percentage points, and is that enough? as i have said publicly before. my preference would have been to have both somewhat higher, but these were negotiated internationally and we did set them with an eye to those other regulatory tools that you talked about. so there are some restraints on the activities and some market discipline and there's some supervisory capacity, and it is always going to be a balance as to how much capital is enough given what other tools you have. >> do you believe that our banks are overall much better shape than they were three years ago? >> yes, senator. >> do you agree with that, mr. secretary? >> i do, senator, absolutely. >> mr. curry? >> definitely with respect to the national banks and the federal thifts. >> yes, senator. >> okay. do you believe that a lot of it is because of required capital in the build-up of capital and

not everything, but do you believe it is central to that, governor tarullo? >> i do believe it is central, but i do believe it is a good bit of de-risking in that perio period. >> is there a -- is there some risk to the economy if people try to take most risks out of the banking system? in other words, you make a loan, and that is a risk. you hedge something, and that is a risk as you try to manage r risk, and you cannot take real risk out of the financial system, can you? mr. secretary? >> sorry. >> no, you can't, senator. >> you would not want to, would you? >> you would not want to. >> governor? >> that is correct. it is always a question of on p one,properly understood risk and a buffer when it happens. >> agreeing with the governor. >> i also do as well, senator.

>> thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you all for your testimony in being here with us today. now, with the continued threat from europe and the recent reminder that risks in the financial system must be appropriately managed, we must remain vigilant and complete the implementation whilst we perform to enhance the financial superiority and risk. this hearing issed a u journed. -- this hearing is adjourned.

president barack obama is urging europe's leaders to act urgently and decisively to solve the country's crisis. he says that the crisis in europe is partly to blame for the continued weakness in the united states. see his comments tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span followed by reaction of house republican leaders. tonight is the sixth annual radio and television correspondents dinner. house speaker john boehner is the speaker with emmy award winning comedian wayne brady. coverage begins at 9:00 p.m. eastern. mr. gorbachev, tear down this wall. >> sunday night at 9:00 eastern

and 7:00 pacific, mark ronald reagan's speech from the brandenberg gate at west germany. and this weekend on c-span3, the series, the contenders and 14 key political figures who ran for president and lost, but changed political history. this sunday at 7:30 p.m., 1884 republican candidate james blaine, american history tv this weekend on c-span3. witnesses at a senate hearing this week urge congress to make changes to the 199 anti-poverty program known as taniff or temporary assistance for needy families which expires. one of the persons at the hearing is ron haskins of the brookings institution who helped to bring the program into existence as a house staffing

member. the hearing is about an hour and a half. >> the meeting will come to order. robert kennedy once said that as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. nearly 50 million americans are currently living in poverty, and that includes 16 million children. in 2009, more than 31% of working families were in poverty, and that is more than 10 million people. our safety net is designed to give those in poverty a fighting chance. temporary assistance for needy families or tanif is one of the bedro bedrocks. it gives people access to job training and education, and helps to fight the evil of poverty. today, we will look at tanif and the new challenges that are facing americans in poverty. until the 1996 reform law welfare was open ended. but through the reform, congress gave the system direction.

it now focuses on the jobs and promotes self-sufficiency, and figuratively speaking, it teaches people to fish. tanif now helps people by funding child care and job search, and in 2005, the federal deficit act changed tanif and dit not heelp people to find jobs, and in some cases, it helped some states to reduce caseloads and used its for other case. we saw this come the play in the great recession. tanif did not respond to the recession as many of us would have hoped. other safety net programs expend panded to make sure that others were properly fed and provide health care, and tanif did not. and some states cut caseloads, but people were not rising out of poverty. fewer than 2 million people

received cash assistance through tanif which is far less than previous years and we of course want to see tanif increase, and we want it to be for the right reason, because people are finding work. we need to make sure it is not because people are falling through the cracks out assistance and without a job, and we need to learn from the lessons of the great recession. tanif works well when there are jobs open for people to fill. but when there are millions of people looking for work, the program does not respond as well as it should. our goal should be to craft a system that works regardless of the economic climate. tanif expires on september 30th, and we have an opportunity to strengthen it as we work toward re reauthorization, and we need to keep the core principles in mind as we work through the process. the united states must have a strong social safety net and not just for the sake of having one. the american people are our

greatest national resource, and as a nation, we cannot afford to leave anyone behind. leaders can't lead if they are hungry. and inventors cannot invent if they are homeless, so let us prepare for a full reauthorization of tanif and remember that the nation is only as great as the least amount of us, and let us move forward to fight the evil of poverty. sir. >> thank you, mr. chairman, and i want to thank you for the important hearing on poverty and the effect on families w. the economy still struggling, poverty is a critical challenge for the nation. the 2010 poverty rate of 15.1% is the highest seen in the past 17 years and the current economic recession, and especially, it is es pepecially acute for children, and in 2010, even over 1 in 5 children were poor in this country. that is up from 1 in 6 in 2006.

poverty is also an incredibly complicated issue, and oneanced that can be with the role of the states, and there is a role of the federal government when it relates to mover ti. one thing we can agree on is that poverty is bad for children and in some cases a risk factor for child negligent or maltreatment, and it is the correlation of poverty and the potential for child negligent that i intend to focus on today. to data assembled by the center for law and social policy, poverty is the single best predictor of child maltreatment. children living in families below $15,000 were 22 times more likely to be abused or neglected than those living in families with incomes of $30,000 or more. i want to be clear. poverty does not cause

negligent, and being poor does not mean that one is a neglectful parent, but poverty does add stress to already overstressed families and creates conditions that are often detrimental to children. parents living in the deep and the persistent poverty are often tired, frustrated and frightened. leading to short tempers and sometimes directed towards their children. many parents in poverty substance from the substance abuse and mental illness and unwilling or unable to get support for problems. and subpar housing exposes children to real health risks. unfortunately the programs that ares a sin signed to this jurisdiction are not working well together even though they are essentially serving the same people. an example is the assistance for needy families or tanif. it is a program to end dependences on government prom graps and to more broadly promote child well-being.

over time the focus of tanif has shifted from working with adults to focus on getting work to a stream of purposes that are unconnected for job readiness. depending on the spending or the caseload, tanif is a welfare welfare to work program has been replaced with replaced with the emergence of tannif as a welfare program. in the year leading up to the expiration of tanif and and each subsequent year, the obama administration has failed to propose a reauthorization of the programs. if this committee decides to reauthorize tanif next year, we will have to decide whether to recalibrate it from a welfare to work program. and you have the accept that the tanif spending and much of the cash assistance is directed to the low income children, and we need to address the fact that

the tanif spending is unaccounted for and the spending a and the services are not associated with child welfare agencies. we hope that the next few years will usher in much needed reforms to the child welfare system, and as we have learned today, the tanif bloc grant will be a part of the conversation. mr. chairman, thank you for holding the hearing and i look forward to hearing from the witnesses, and it is important hearing as far as i'm concerned. >> thank you, senator, very much. i am pleased to welcome our witnesses. we will have three. dr. ron haskins from the brooking institution, and dr. laura lane, the dean of school of social work at the university of michigan, and kay brown, d k director of income security at the united states government and accountability office. thank all of you very, very much for taking the time to testify

about something that is very, very important, and we look forward to your testimony and ask for you to be candid and direct in your five or six statements of the opening statements that you have prepared remarks will be automatically included in the record. why don't you begin dr. haskins. >> thank you, mr. chairman. ranking member, and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me and it is a privilege to testify before the committee. i want to talk about four issues in five minutes, and that makes me an issue a minute man. >> okay. we are going the time you, too. >> you are going to what? >> i am teasing you. i said we are going to time you and hold you to it, too. no, now, don't you worry. >> i will get the 30 seconds of exchange back. >> yes. >> and the we will talk about the exchanges of poverty and what to do about it. one, the trends in poverty and i included a figure in the testimony that to me has two big

surprises in them. one is that we have made virtually no progress against poverty since 1975 despite the fact that we are spending a ton more money and the poverty rate in elderly in most societies is not lower than for children, and those are two exceptionally important facts that we have to buckle down to figure out what to do with poverty and especially concentrate on the children. and issue two, the spending. between the states and the federal government we spend $1 trillion on means tested programs and this number has increased every year since 1965, so that the idea that we are not spending enough money is probably incorrect. we could be spending it poorly or might not be focused on the poor or some of the programs might be unsuccessful but we are spending a lot of money, and $13,000 per poor person, and a lot of it is on health care, and critics mention that, but that is where congress decided to spend the money, and unless you want to change that, 45% is on the poor. the nation has made a great

commitment to helping the poor and it increases every year. third issue, the causes. i think that four are especially important. the first is work rates where in a long term decline of work of males in the united states, the work rate of young males and especially black males and i'm referring to before the requestion session, because i don't want to confuse these, because these are trends before the recession, and we have a real problem of males in the united states for reasons that are not clear and for females the opposite is true. females are working more and people are aware that married women have joined the force since world war ii and decreasing the numbers burk never married mothers and the poorest group of mothers have had a spectacular increase in unemployment, and even today after two recessions, the likelihood they have a job is greater, about 20% than before welfare reform. that group is working a lot, and still we need to boost the work rates. second, the wages, and these are astounding at the bottom of the

distribution, and our wages at the 10 percentile, and below in the united states on average were where they were 30 years ago and it is hard to make progress against poverty and have 10% of the people below, and it is an astounding mathematical fact as i point out in the testimony, and as long as the wages don't change and what we do about the minimum wage, it is a real problem to get out of poverty, and if they work full time at minimum wage, they will not be out of poverty. and the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the biggest cause of poverty in my estimation and we have had a increase of female-headed families and the poverty rates are twice as the majority who are never married and 45% of white children and 47% of black children, and 40% of children are born outside of marriage, and so the probable of

being in poverty is high. and finally education is a big issue. i would say that the educational system both at the preschool level, k-12 and postsecondary needs a lot of work. i would not say necessarily a failure, but the highest probability is preschool and i will talk about that. now, let me talk about the strategies to fight poverty and i want to preface the remarks by saying that the personal responsibility is an absolute tier here. and three of the four tiers is substantial component of personal choices, and if people don't make better choices regardless of what you do in the hearing room or in this congress, we will still have a prob lem with poverty and you have to worry about decision of young people the drop out of school and not work and have children before they have children and not getting married. the first strategy that has worked forever and it is not hard to understand, but it is to give them money. that is what we did with the d eldererly and especially in the

'70s and we have a low poverty rate primarily as a result of social security which congress did. that strategy will not work for young able-bodied americans, because people don't believe they should get welfare. so second strategy is to do everything possible to encourage and force people to work and then subsidize the income. i point out to the committee, that is is a highly bipartisan solution and on one hand tough work requirements but on the other hand, earned income tax credit, and medicaid and child care and other programs and i would say pass at least 40 pieces of legislation over the period starting roughly in the early 1980s to make our system a means tested benefits more friendly to working families and in the old days if you went to work you lost everything, and that is no longer the case. the two other strategies -- and so we need to emphasize work and maintain the work support system. the etic child tax credit and so forth and the other two things i mention in passing. focus on education and we have

high data that quality preschool could make a difference. it is not controversial for the federal congress to be involved in preschool, because it has for so long, and the child care that we spend a lot of federal dollars on is the heart of the problem, because it is of average quality or worse and that where the we could make progress by increasing the average quality of the child care, and finally nonmarital births and we can reduce teen pregnancy, and we have reduced teen pregnancy every year except for two years since 1991, and we have a lot of strategies there, and even in the 20 somethings we have more programs of the more coverage and comprehensive family planning services and mass advertising campaigns and plus the teen praegnancy progras and if we could spend more money there, we would reduce nonmarital birthrates and that would be a great start. >> thank you, doctor. that was very good.

doctor? >> i also want to thank the members of the committee for inviting me here and to join ron haskins and kay brown on the panel. i'm a social ron haskins and kay brown on this panel. i'm a social anthropologist and i work on family in poverty and the institutions that serve them. today, i don't want this to be a contest, ron, i'm going to try to highlight six themes about families and illustrate them with examples representative of the data i've worked with. theme number one, before welfare eligible and both welfare eligible and welfare using populations are varied. researchers in washington state found five sub groups ranging from quick levers who left tanf within a year and did not return to stayers who continued on tanf with barely a break. and these groups have fairly different needs. second, both welfare support and the income from low wage labor leave families struggling. families cannot sustain themselves on welfare alone or on low wage work alone.

and those relying on these low incomes can experience what i call a cascade effect. when a relatively small problem triggers life-changing events. one texas woman i interviewed had moved off welfare into work and out of public housing into her own apartment. she still depended on subsidized child care for her two children, but when her 2-year-old bit another child at day care, he was asked to leave care and her child care subsidy lapsed when she could not find new child care within the ten days allowed. she couldn't work regularly, she lost her job and her eligibility for renewed child care subsidy. she couldn't pay her rent and was evicted. eight weeks from the biting episode, she was jobless, homeless and without child care to allow her to hunt for a job or to work. third theme. tanf rates have remained stable in a time of recession, but disconnected households with neither earned income nor welfare income have increased.

estimates say between 13% and 20% of single parent poverty households are disconnected at any one time. one chicago woman in the study had worked all of her life and never been on welfare. as the recession deepened, her hours were reduced and then she was injured on the job. her employer contested her application for unemployment and she was not yet eligible to apply for tanf. her car was repossessed, making doctors visits for her injury and her job search almost impossible. she cut back on her own eating to purchase food and then prepare meals to sell for others. it was four months before she received unemployment benefits. theme number four. more families are living in extreme poverty, often leaving them debilitated by untreated medical conditions and extensive debt. schaeffer and eden estimate that as of the beginning of 2011,

about 1.46 million united states households with about 2.8 million children were surviving on $2 in cash or less in income per day per person in a given month. theme number five. the jobs available for low skilled or low educated workers leave the working poor particularly vulnerable. chicago researchers lambert and henley studied low wage work in retail and hospitality. successful applicants provide lots of availability. i can work any time between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. i might be assigned, say, around 25 hours per week with the timing and number of hours varying each week. however, my employer expects that i can be available any hours between 8:00 and 8:00. needing more money, i take on a second job. however, when that job conflicts with hours assigned by my first job, i am punished with reduced hours in my first job.

they found what they call the full-time no-hours week. unemployment and underemployment also affect the men who father children in low income single parent families leaving both them and the families impoverished. six, there are a number of policies that i think can work for families and in some ways this echoes what we've just heard. while paid work is the core of family stability, it is enabled by work supportive services including a robust eitc, tanf, particularly when used as a bridging program for family spacing time limited periods of need. access to child care and health care, a gradual diminution of welfare benefits as recipients enter work so they receive supports necessary for their stabilization, an emphasis on best employment practice so that parents can work and parent simultaneously. we also need to look at

alternate programs for parents physically or mentally unable to work. their access to disability services and their access to support such as supported work placements and longer term income and rehabilitative assistance. and we need programs that encourage and reward fathers fiscal and logistical involvement. child support programs that encourage that involvement and training and placement programs for men. and overall, we need opportunities for program experimentation and evaluation to support low income families and children. thanks very much. >> thank you, doctor, very much. ms. brown, you're next. >> chairman baucus -- >> do you want to bring your microphone, please, a little closer. >> how's that? >> that's great. thank you. >> chairman baucus, ranking member hatch and members of the committee, i'm pleased to be here today to discuss our work on the role of tanf in helping poor families.

over the past 15 years, federal and state spending for tanf has totaled about $406 billion representing a significant investment in efforts to promote self-sufficiency and combat poverty. my remarks based on previously published gao reports will focus on the performance of tanf as a safety net, as a welfare-to-work program and a funding source for other services. first on tanf as a safety net. the story of tanf's early years is well known. the strong economy combined with the new focus on work contributed to a decline in the rolls of more than 50%. many former welfare recipients increased their income through employment. however, much of the caseload decline resulted from fewer eligible families participating in the program. perhaps in response to tanf's

new rules such as work requirements and time limits. we've been particularly concerned about a small but possibly growing portion of families that were eligible for tanf but did not work, had very low incomes and did not receive cash benefits. more recently, we had the first test of tanf during severe economic times. the relatively modest national caseload increase of 13% along with caseload decreases in some states raises questions about the responsiveness of tanf. for example, we recently estimated that among poor and near poor families that lost job in the recession and used up their unemployment benefits, 40% received food stamp benefits yet less than 10% received tanf assistance. next on tanf and moving parents into work, tanf's work participation requirement is the primary federal tool to

encourage states to prepare parents for work. states are expected to ensure that 50% of work-eligible families receiving cash assistance are engaged in certain federally defined work activities. however, states have generally engaged fewer families than envisioned, closer to one-third, with little change over time. despite this, states can still meet their work participation requirement by relying on several policy and funding options. as a result of these options, states may not have the incentive to engage more families or to work with families with complex needs. lastly, on the use of tanf for a broad array of services. tanf plays a significant role in state funding of other programs and services for low income families as allowed under program rules. in fact, in fiscal year 2011, federal and state tanf

expenditures for purposes other than cash assistance amounted to 71% of the total. these purposes included child care, child welfare, earned income, tax credits and teen pregnancy counseling. however, we don't know enough about how these funds are used and who benefits. this information gap hinders decisionmakers in considering the success of tanf and what trade-offs might be involved in any changes to tanf when it is reauthorized. in conclusion, the federal/state tanf partnership makes significant resources available for families with children. with these resources, tanf has provided financial support to these families, helped many parents step into jobs and provided states with flexible funding to support programs consistent with tanf goals. at the same time there are questions about the strength and